Lambdaman, supporting Bootstrap

After watching talks or videos of Propositions as Types, folk ask me how they can get their own Lambdaman t-shirt. In the past, I tried to make it available through various services, but they always rejected the design as a copyright violation. (It's not, it's fair use.) Thanks to a little help from my friends, CustomInk has agreed to print the design as a Booster. Sign up now, order will be printed on October 15. Any profits (there will be more if there is a bigger order) go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order has already surpassed our goal of fifty shirts!

Option A vs B: Kicked into the long grass

I've been putting off posting about the final outcome of the West-East Cycle Route confrontation at Edinburgh City Council's Transport and Environment committee, in part because there was no final outcome.

I sat through four hours of Edinburgh Council's Transport and Environment Committee. The end result was a fudge. The Council heard adamant depositions from both sides, and decided not to decide. They will form a stakeholder group, with representatives from all involved, and attempt to come to a compromise that satisfies all sides. But it's hard to see how that can happen: if we don't get a straight route it will be a disaster, but if we do folk in Roseburn will fear an impact on their businesses (studies show cycle routes don't harm business, but they seem to be taking the Gove line: they are tired of hearing from experts).

Though perhaps we were lucky to get a fudge. Had it gone to a straight vote, following the whip Greens and Labour would have voted for Option A (7 votes) while the SDP, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats would have voted for Option B (8 votes). As it was, the Greens gave a rousing defense of Option A, with fantastic speeches from Nigel Bagshaw and Chas Booth. Everyone else supported the 'compromise', and took the opportunity to excoriate the Greens for taking a principled stand. Even those who would have voted for Option B expressed support for cycling, and perhaps that is something we can build on.

Dave duFeu of Spokes posted an excellent summary, including links to the webcast of the meeting and a list of the steps you can take to support the West-East Cycle Route.

The Edinburgh Evening News offered coverage in the two days before: Cyclists take to street to support £6m cycle “superhighway” and D-Day for cycleway in Edinburgh amidst anger and division. The first of these features a couple of photos of me arguing with opponents of the cycle route in Roseburn. I don't look calm and collected. Oddly, I can't find any coverage the Evening News gave to the outcome of the Transport and Environment committee meeting. Was there any?

Not only are Roseburn residents up in arms. A similar cycleway in Bearsden, near Glasgow, is attracting comparable ire from its locals. What is our best way forward to fight bicycle bigots?

Previously: 

  Option A: Think about the children

  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

A correspondent on Quora explains the insider's view to an outsider. Some selections:

• You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if a question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines"  (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small -- seehttp://www.tricki.org/tricki/map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.
• You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher". The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose pointsare functions or curves -- that is, you "zoom out" so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other "nearby" functions. Using this kind of zooming out technique, you can say very complex things in short sentences -- things that, if unpacked and said at the zoomed-in level, would take up pages. Abstracting and compressing in this way makes it possible to consider extremely complicated issues with one's limited memory and processing power.
• You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.

ISDS enables corruption

I've long known that ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is one of the worst aspects of TTIP, TTP, and CETA. But I've thought the main problem with ISDS was first, that it enabled businessmen to sue governments over laws enacted to save their citizenry (as in the cartoon below), and, second, its secrecy. What I did not understand was how it enables corruption. Kudos to Buzzfeed for their detailed investigation.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals. This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:

• A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
• In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village — including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
• Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.

Option A: Think about the children

Fellow tweeter @DarlingSteveEDI captured my image (above) as we gathered for Ride the Route this morning, in support of Option A for the Edinburgh's proposed West-East Cycle Route (the route formerly known as Roseburn to Leith Walk). My own snap of the gathering is below.

Fellow blogger Eilidh Troup considers another aspect of the route, safety for schoolchildren. Option A is far safer than Option B for young children cycling to school: the only road crossing in Option A is guarded by a lollipop lady, while children taking Option B must cross *three* busy intersections unaided.

It's down to the wire: members of the Transport and Environment Committee vote tomorrow. The final decision may be closely balanced, so even sending your councillor (and councillors on the committee) a line or two can have a huge impact. If you haven't written, write now, right now!

Previously:
  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

Late breaking addendum:
  Sustrans supports Option A: It’s time for some big decisions…
 

Ride the Route in support of Option A

I've written before about the Edinburgh West-East Cycle Route (previously called Roseburn to Leith Walk), and the importance of choosing Option A over Option B.

It's fantastic that Edinburgh has decided to invest 10% of its transport budget into active travel. If we invest regularly and wisely in cycling infrastructure, within twenty years Edinburgh could be a much more pleasant place to live and work, on a par with Copenhagen or Rotterdam. But that requires investing the effectively. The choice of Option A vs B is a crucial step along the way. Option B offers a far less direct route and will do far less to attract new people to cycling, undermining the investment and making it harder to attract additional funding from Sustrans. Unless we start well, it will be harder to continue well.

SNP Councillors are putting it about that since Sustrans awarded its competition to Glasgow rather than Edinburgh that the route cannot be funded. But that is nonsense. Edinburgh can build the route on its own, it would just take longer. And in any event, year on year funding from Sustrans is still available. But funding is only likely to be awarded for an ambitious project that will attract more folk to cycling, and that means Option A.

(Imagine if auto routes were awarded by competition. You can have the M80 to Glasgow or the M90 to Edinburgh, but not both ... Sort of like the idea of holding a bake sale to fund a war ...)

Supporters have organised a Ride the Route event 8am Monday 29 August, leaving from Charlotte Square, which will take councillors and press along the route to promote Option A.  (And here's a second announcement from Pedal on Parliament.) I hope to see you there!

Eric Joyce: Why the Brexit vote pushed me to support Scottish independence

Former Labour MP Eric Joyce explains his change of heart.

At the referendum, still an MP, I gave independence very serious thought right up to the close of the vote. I finally came down on the side of No because I thought big EU states with a potential secession issue, like Spain and France, would prevent an independent Scotland joining the EU. This is obviously no longer the case. And I was, like the great majority of the economists and other experts whose opinion I valued, convinced that being outside the EU would be bonkers – it would badly harm our economy and hurt Scots in all sorts of unforeseen ways too.
The Brexit vote reversed that overnight: all of the arguments we in the unionist camp had used were made invalid at worst, questionable at best. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily all wrong. But it does mean that open-minded, rational No voters should at the very least seriously re-consider things in the light of the staggering new context. They should have an open ear to the experts saying that with independence, jobs in Scotland’s financial and legal service sectors will expand as English and international firms look to keep a foothold in the EU.  And to the reasonable prospect of an eventual £50+ oil price might realistically open the way to a final, generational, upswing in employment, and to security for Scotland’s extractive industries and their supply chain. And to the idea that preserving Scotland’s social democracy in the face of the Little Englander mentality of right-wing English Tories might be worth the fight.

Propositions as Types generalised: The Rosetta Stone

From Physics,Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone by John C. Baez and Mike Stay, courtesy of @CompSciFact, @sigfpe, and @notjfmc.

Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!

On 2 August, I attended a meeting in Roseburn organised by those opposed to the new cycleway planned by the city. Local shopkeepers fear they will see a reduction in business, unaware this is a common cycling fallacy: study after study has shown that adding cycleways increases business, not the reverse, because pedestrians and cyclists find the area more attractive.

Feelings in Roseburn run strong. The locals don't trust the council: who can blame them after the fiasco over trams? But the leaders of the campaign are adept at cherry picking statistics, and, sadly, neither side was listening to the other.

On 30 August, the Edinburgh Council Transport and Environment Committee will decide between two options for the cycle route, A and B. Route A is direct. Route B goes round the houses, adding substantial time and rendering the whole route less attractive. If B is built, the opportunity to shift the area away from cars, to make it a more pleasant place to be and draw more business from those travelling by foot, bus, and cycle, goes out the window.

Locals like neither A nor B, but in a spirit of compromise the Transport and Environment Committee may opt for B. This will be a disaster, as route B will be far less likely to draw people out of their cars and onto their cycles, undermining Edinburgh's ambitious programme to attract more people to cycling before it even gets off the ground.

Investing in cycling infrastructure can make an enormous difference. Scotland suffers 2000 deaths per year due to pollution, and 2500 deaths per year due to inactivity. The original proposal for the cycleway estimates benefits of £14.5M over ten years (largely from improved health of those attracted to cycling) vs a cost of £5.7M, a staggering 3.3x return on investment. Katie Cycles to School is a brilliant video from Pedal on Parliament that drives home how investment in cycling will improve lives for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Want more detail? Much has been written on the issues.
  Roseburn Cycle Route: Evidence-based local community support.
  Conviction Needed.

The Transport Committee will need determination to carry the plan through to a successful conclusion. This is make or break: will Edinburgh be a city for cars or a city for people? Please write to your councillors and the transport and environment committee to let them know your views.

Previously: 
Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: A vs B
Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: the website

Roseburn to Leith Walk

Subsequently:
Ride the Route in support of Option A
Option A: Think about the children

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

Many programming languages, especially domain-specific ones, are designed by amateurs. How do we prevent obvious irregularities and disasters in languages before they become widespread? (Aspects of Javascript and R come to mind.)

Folk in the human-computer interaction community have a notion of 'expert evaluation'. I wonder if we could develop something similar for programming languages?

Jakub Zalewski passed me the article 'What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists', which treads related ground, but for physics rather than computing.